Page 31 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

31.

Time Elapsed from Initial Collapse: 11 Hours

The entrance to Redding Mining looked more like a prison than a business.

An acre of gravel—and today, mud—was encircled with a six-foot-high fence of thin metal posts sharpened like old-time Prussian army helmets and painted gray. Entry was via an electronically operated chain-link gate about twenty feet wide. Inside the forbidding barrier were administrative offices to the right and factories and workers’ buildings to the left. Straight ahead were the three mine shafts themselves.

Colter Shaw rolled his bike to a stop just outside the gate and squinted to make sure he was correctly reading the signs above the entrances.

inferno

hades

hell

A man with a perverse sense of humor, this Gerard Redding.

In the hills behind the mines were two smokestacks a hundred feet high, with fumes wafting from them. Scaffolding and fencing and pipes and conduit and relics of old, rusting machinery were everywhere. Mining apparently did not require tidiness.

A skeleton crew was working today and their efforts had nothing to do with copper. While Annie Coyne’s battle technique was digging trenches, Gerard Redding’s men and women were filling and stacking sandbags. To gain access to the office you had to climb up and down sandbag “stairs” assembled at the gate. All the workers’ vehicles were parked outside this perimeter, except for a late-model Mercedes and a Lexus, which were inside the protection zone. The owners of those vehicles weren’t going anywhere.

He climbed off the bike. There was an armed guard in a small shed beside the gate. “Can I help you?”

“I’m working with Mayor Tolifson. I’d like to see Mr. Redding.”

The guard looked him over as he made a phone call and explained Shaw’s presence. He seemed to stand slightly to attention as he listened to the response—though this might have been imagination. He disconnected and said, “Wait here.”

Shaw recalled that Tolifson and Starr had not spoken kindly of the man.

That’s putting sugar on it…

Shaw reflected that the attack earlier by Bear, while it might technically have been on the Redding Mining property, was a long way from this location. Was that significant?

He looked at the sandbagging operation. It was an impressive wall. Had they started building it before the levee’s collapse? Maybe, though they were moving quickly. It was not impossible that they began their work after the witching hour of 6:15 a.m.

A few minutes later a man in his seventies appeared from one of the buildings He was stooped but in fit shape, and clearly muscled. His face was weathered, and thinning white hair was combed back over the top of his narrow skull.

He walked with a stride, and climbed the improvised stairs to join Shaw. “It’s okay, Fred,” he said to the guard.

The man retreated to the shed.

“Gerard Redding.”

Shaw identified himself.

The miner glanced at the Yamaha and Shaw looked for any indication that the man was familiar with him or the bike—and therefore had heard a report from Bear about the earlier encounter.

None that Shaw could see.

He handed Redding another Shaw Incident Services card. Unlike Coyne he stuck it in his rear slacks pocket without as much as a glance.

“You know about the levee.” Shaw nodded to the sandbagging workers. Did they fill and stack just a bit more quickly now that the boss was present? He added, “The city’s overwhelmed, so our company’s helping. The mayor’s ordered a mandatory evacuation.”

A breezy laugh. “He the police chief now?”

“Acting, yes.”

“Hm. Well, sir, you’re standing in unincorporated Olechu County. So mandatory ’s not a word that means anything.”

“Then ‘requesting.’?” Shaw looked around. “Your employees might want the option. Though it looks like you sent most of them home anyway. Or told the shift not to come in.”

Was it the latter? That could be incriminating, depending on when he’d issued the stay-at-home order.

But Redding did not step into the trap. “No, the whole shift was here. But as soon as I heard about the collapse, I got ’em out. These boys—and gals—volunteered. Hugh and me, the operations manager, we’ve been helping with the bags too, in between moving the electronics and paperwork records to high ground. In case the whole levee comes down.”

“You moved fast.”

“I started yesterday.”

Ah…an admission!

The miner continued, “I thought something like this might happen. I know the Never Summer. It’s been part of my whole family’s life for nearly two hundred years. I check the weather daily. Here and up north, at the source. Snowpack—how deep? Last winter—how cold was it? Was there any melt in January or February or is the mountain still loaded with the snows from October, just waiting to melt and flood? And now, record heat? I knew it was going to swell. I always keep sand and bags ready.” He nodded to a huge pile.

How good an actor was he?

“So we’ll stay put.”

“Your workers?”

“You notice anything about their cars?”

Shaw had not.

“They’re all pointed at Hillside Road. Which, yes, goes up the hillside. And look at the exhausts. The engines’re running. We hear the levee goes entirely, they can be out of here in thirty seconds.”

He squinted as he looked over Shaw. “I suppose you talked to the Petticoat Junction girl.”

“Annie Coyne. Yes.”

“I’ll bet she’s not leaving either.”

When Shaw said nothing, Redding chuckled. “Of course not. She’s afraid I’ll sneak in and turn her faucets on. Flood her out from the inside. Or burn her spread down. That woman needs to chill. She’s convinced my family’s been stealing water from hers for generations. A barn owl spooks and it’s because I’m poisoning crops late at night. A combine breaks, it’s sabotage. The price of soy goes down, I’m pulling strings.”

Shaw looked at the wall of sandbags that had grown higher as they’d spoken. It was now about four feet tall and the way the workers were moving, it seemed likely they’d have the front of the mining operation covered in the next hour.

Shaw’s eyes scanned the mine, the refinery and the surrounding hills.

Then the wall of bags.

“You think this’ll hold?”

“I’m an engineer, Mr. Shaw. I calculated estimated velocity, volume, dispersion per hundred feet from the levee, grade of the land. And temperature—everyone forgets about temperature. Bad mistake.” He examined the bags. “It will hold. Let’s hope the forecast’s wrong, and we get some overcast on the mountain up north. Slow the melt. Now, I appreciate your visit and you can thank Mayor Tolifson for his concern. Of course, you know he’s of two minds.”

“How do you mean?”

“He wants me to evacuate so he doesn’t need to allocate resources to save assholes like me who don’t feel like evacuating.” He looked at Shaw wryly. “Then there’s the other aspect. He doesn’t want us to stop the sandbagging. If my mine gets destroyed or has to shut down for a year, that means layoffs. And you know what unemployment means in places like Olechu County.”

“I see a lot of small towns in my work. It means drugs and crime and overdoses.”

“You’ve got that one hundred percent right, Mr. Shaw. And I suspect that that’s more than acting police chief Tolifson can deal with. Anything more I can help you with?”

“No. Just wanted to deliver the message.” His eyes scanned the hillside above the offices, the road to the refineries.

“Consider it delivered.”

Shaw turned to walk back to his bike.

Redding called, “One thing.”

Shaw looked back.

“Here you are, Paul Revere, riding around warning everybody, ‘The water is coming, the water is coming,’ on that horse of yours. You better figure out where you’re going to get your own ass to when you see that tidal wave coming your way. If it’s easier to come back here than it is to get to high ground, feel free.”

“Appreciate the offer. With all due respect, I hope I don’t have to take you up on it.”

“With all due respect, so do I.”